Leaderboard Zone

Many, many folks who were at the CM Summit last week asked me what music we were playing, and after a few false starts, I found a service that lets me make and share playlists.

Each conference I organize has a soundtrack, I pick songs for a reason. I don’t overthink it, but I do like to have a soundtrack for each show’s vibe. The CMSummit last week had a great vibe, I think. Here’s that playlist:

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At the CM Summit earlier this week, Terry Kawaja debuted his parody “Mad Avenue Blues”, set to Don McLean’s American Pie. It’s now up on YouTube. It’s a brilliant send up of our industry. You’ll want to watch it a few times to get all the jokes.

Skeptics might wonder just how much subversion and wit is conveyable via 140-character updates. But in recent months Twitter users have begun to find a route around that limitation by employing Twitter as a pointing device instead of a communications channel: sharing links to longer articles, discussions, posts, videos — anything that lives behind a URL. Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from “passed links” at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it’s just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.

Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google’s near monopoly in searching. At its heart, Google’s system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google’s search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That’s a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it’s not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the “super fresh” Web.

Thanks for the call out, Steven, and the pointer, Fred, and the original idea, Yusuf (Medhi, at Microsoft, who really should get the credit for the term).

That’s Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO, who I swear I heard say the opposite (read about 2/3rds down) just a week ago at the D Conference. Perhaps she’s finally putting the ghost of failed negotiations behind her, or, perhaps she’s just furthering them. What do you all think?